


This Distant Sea

by maplemood



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Force Ghosts, Force Visions, Gen, Mentors, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Spoilers, Star Wars: The Last Jedi Spoilers, a smidge of background reylo, lots and lots of ocean imagery, of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-15 21:27:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13039767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: The voice’s certainty is as infuriating as it is terrifying. It sinks a hook in Rey’s heart.You will do what needs to be done.I won’t know how.You do not know now. You will before the end.





	This Distant Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Yet another story that I should not have written since I have no time and deadlines to meet. But here, have some Luke & Rey angst.

Sleep doesn’t come easily, on the nights it comes at all. More often Rey tosses in her cot, restlessness burning inside her like a fever, like grains of biting sand. Or she paces through the network of caves that make up the new—and last and only—rebel base. Cold as they are. Gooseflesh prickles across every inch of Rey’s skin when she spars with stalagmites in the dark. For a while it keeps off the burning. A very little while.

She always has to go back. To her cot, where she lies and listens to the breathing of her friends, curled up tight and close. They should be enough. Some nights they very nearly are; sometimes it’s almost morning before the burning returns.

No, Rey doesn’t sleep. Not much. Not anymore.

Even so.

She dreams of the ocean.

+

She dreams of salt spray and streams of sopping seaweed. She dreams of waves breaking across the beach at Ahch-To, of rain billowing down in sheets; Rey dreams herself back under that rain, back on that beach. She stands barefoot, soaked to the bone, and it feels as if all the waters of this world swirl at her feet, yet she is as rootless as the sand, swept in and out by the tide.

 _I’m back_ , she calls out, thin and high. A child’s voice. _I came back! Master,_ she shouts, not even hoping for an answer. _I’ve come home._  

+

She told Leia—General Organa, she told General Organa—that the only thing she felt in his passing was peace.

Well.

That is true, as far as it goes. It’s not quite a lie, at any rate; there’d be no point in lying to his sister, who could feel it all perfectly well for herself and doesn’t need Rey’s grief piled atop her own, though, in Rey’s case, it is not quite grief, either, and it is not quite anger, and it is not even quite pain...it is…

It is.

Longing, maybe. A last grasp at what could have been.

+

The ocean doesn’t ebb. Not ever. It swells before her eyes in the dusty dryness of the caves until she can almost breathe it in. She wonders if she’ll ever go back. Properly, bodily. She should find them. Whatever remains are left, she should bury them. It’s only right.

_There’s no time for sentiment, Rey._

She jumps. Whirls around as if she’ll catch him standing behind her shoulder, and if she swung back now she’d be just in time to punch him in his scowling, sorry, distinctly unlegendary face.

The cave is empty. Parched dry as a desert bone. Empty.

 _Where are you?_ Rey almost shouts out loud. _Master...Master Skywa—Luke!_ She stumbles over what to call him, even in her head. Neither of them really called the other anything.

_Where are you?_

Rey balls her trembling hands into fists. She reaches out, into the deep and salty wetness that she feels hovering in this cave, ready to break over her head. She pokes, pulls, strains. A voice, a breath, a whisper, anything.

Nothing.

 _Show yourself._ Dimly, Rey realizes she’s fallen to her knees.  

The ocean roars.

_Show yourself!_

It doesn’t break.

_Please._

+

Luke isn’t the only one who walks in her head. Far away from the watery cold, stalking through his own world of blood and fire and mirrored black, another man wraps his fingers around Rey’s heart and squeezes tight.

_You dream of an ocean._

_You dream of a father._

Rey believes (she must believe—she must hope, at least) he dreams of them too. The waters he saw through her eyes, and who knows, may have wondered at, just as she did. On and on they spread, blue and green and black, cloudy glass; on and on, world without end.

But Ben Solo’s father is fixed. Whatever past lies between them, and however much Ben wants to kill it, that will never change.

Rey has no father.

She has many fathers.

She had Luke for no more than a week. Or she never did have him at all. One or the other, yet they both feel true.

Rey only wants…

(Force knows what she _wants_.)

...to talk. A real conversation, for the first time and the last.

+

_Speak to me._

She waited until nightfall to creep back. Same cave, same dry emptiness that Rey can only hope will fill again with the beating of the sea. She sits cross-legged on the dirt floor now, eyes closed, reaching until the muscles in her neck stand out like cords and her brain feels ready to twist itself into knots.

“Luke,” she whispers, not hearing herself. “Master.”

_I’m here. I’m waiting. Come to me._

Drafts whip a haze of dirt off the floor, into her face. Rey sneezes. She opens her eyes, wipes her nose, curses her bad luck, and closes her eyes again.

_Still here._

A half-hour passes. Her legs cramp. She’s been reaching into nothing, seeing nothing but the backs of her lids.

Rey cracks one eye open.

Still _here._

It’s settled then. Luke Skywalker is every bit as annoying in death as he was in life, not to mention slow to help. How comforting.

Rey closes her eye and shifts a bit. She’s been patient for close to an hour now. Ever the obedient apprentice. That didn’t work for her then; why should it now?

She bites her lip. _Luke!_

Did the air just shiver? Did it really? Rey takes a quick fast breath—salt, she smells salt, and that strange fishy milk fresh from those great snouty creatures. She’s sure she does; yes, definitely, she _must_.

 _Skywalker!_ She is trembling again, reaching her hands out, her very fingertips as if to skim the waters. _I sailed across the stars to find you,_ Rey thinks grimly. _I came seeking your help and all I found were more questions. Give me this. You owe me at least this._  

Reach. Reach. Only a little farther…

The ocean parts. The billows clap, the currents roar. She sees the weeds and the islands and the reefs, the coves and the bays, the fish, so many fish, swimming, feeding, dying. She sees the skies crack with lightning and boom with thunder as the rain pours down. She sees water. She sees life.

 _Please,_ Rey thinks, _please, please, please, speak to me, reach for me, touch me. I’m nothing, I know nothing, there’s so much you could have taught me, so much more, I’m not—_

_—I’m not I’m not I’m not—_

The voice cracks her open in one stroke.

 _Child!_ It vibrates inside her, a roar made from all the voices of all the waters. _Be still._

Broken open, rattling like a reed in the wind, Rey takes a few minutes to scrape together the pieces of her anger. Once they’re gathered, though, they build, a swarming sandstorm at her core. Her fingers curl to fists. Slowly (painfully slowly) she rises off the ground. Back on her knees. Back on her feet.

 _I won’t!_ She screams into the roaring, and oh, gods, she has never felt so small. Snoke wished he could make her shake like this. Ben Solo prays for it. _How can I, when you left me?_

 _It was my time,_ says the voice, cutting, implacable. _It is not yours._

There’s a hint of a threat there, an unspoken _but it could be_ . Rey clenches her teeth and barrels over it. _You wouldn’t have died. If you’d kept yourself strong in the Force you might have lived._

_Neither is it for you to judge the things of the past._

_No!_ She’s scrabbling for a foothold, seconds away from breaking across the sharp rocks like a wave; she doesn’t care. _You’re nothing but a foolish old man, you don’t see—the past is all I have!_

_BE STILL!_

Thrown back to the ground, Rey tastes blood at the very moment that the wave slams down into her, a maelstrom of bitter water and gritty clouds of foam that sear down her nose and throat. She lies there, prone and gasping, unable to breathe.

 _No,_ the voice says, its roar barely silenced. _We are all more than the sum of our pasts, Rey of Nowhere._

Chilly water drips from her eyes, trickles down to her temples. _They will look to me. When they need you they’ll look to me, and I won’t be able to help them._

 _They will._ The voice’s certainty is as infuriating as it is terrifying. It sinks a hook in Rey’s heart. _And you will do what needs to be done._

_I won’t know how._

_You do not know now. You will before the end._

The sum of her past is hardly anything, but it is certain. Unchangeable. This voice promises no victory, no coming joy. Only uncertainty. For the second time Rey gathers herself together, all blood and knobbed bones, laid bare and broken. She rises.

_I can’t do it. Keeping the balance. I can’t!_

The voice laughs, a laugh of raging billows, a laugh of drowning. All in all, a sound she hopes never to hear again. _Do you think,_ it asks, _that the balance depends only on you? That only you can hold the line between light and dark? Child, the world is so much larger than that._

_But—_

_You must do your part. That is all. All you can do._

_What if—_

_You will do what you must do._

_I need more._ Rey doesn’t dare shout this time. She still can’t keep the anger out of her words. She feels it festering, bursting insider her, coating her tongue. She spits blood on the ground.

_I need you._

_Far less than you think._

_Don’t say that!_ Rey’s knees knock together; she can hardly lift her head up, thanks to the weight of the ocean that bears down upon it. _You might’ve lived,_ she spits out with more blood.

Maybe she imagines it, but the weight lifts, if only by a fraction. Water streams down Rey’s face; she won’t fall again, whatever happens.

 _If this is your peace, I’m glad for you,_ she snaps. _But I have no peace._

The voice is no softer, and no gentler, than it ever was—it still batters into Rey like a winter storm. Yet its tone _is_ different. If only by a fraction.

 _Rey,_ it says. _Look up._

_I can’t._

_Look at me._

The command burns in her center, compels as the Force must compel all living things (hardly ever this directly, more’s the pity). All the same, it is not the Force who straightens her shoulders, or the Force who lifts her chin. The Force does not direct so much as nudge. A massive, molten, cosmic sort of nudge, yes. But Rey is grateful for even the illusion of choice. She lifts her head, and gazes up, ever up, into the heart of the sea.

+

Hours later…

Hours later she wakes from her first deep sleep in months, the voice still lingering in the memories (or dreams?) that clog her head like wet wool. It holds close to her, stripped of its roaring, broken down to something drier, more human.

 _Child,_ Luke says. _Oh, child._ Almost tender, as he never was to her in life. As he was, she thinks, to someone else (a boy, a great frightened boy who could never accept tenderness, even before the end), years ago. _There is nothing for you in what could have been. What’s done is done._

Rey squeezes her eyes shut. Tears ooze out from beneath them, and she swears—she swears on her life—that a hand, rough and work worn, cups her cheek before wiping them away.

_You will find your way, Rey of Nowhere._

When she truly wakes, some time later, Rey tastes blood in her mouth and sea salt on her lips.

+

She dreams of the ocean. Rey dreams of the shoreline, scattered with rocky gray sand, curled with strands of seaweed. She dreams driving gray rain, and the tides she walks in as they swirl out and in, again and again, ever infinite.

Years later, in another time, when the spark has ignited to burn the First Order to ash, after the Lady Rey, Last and First, battled the Supreme Leader and won either his life or his heart, depending on which story you listen to, she will walk along that shore, like she has for years, only this time she will start to run. She will dash through the rain, her feet kicking up bursts of foamy spray, until she’s red in the face,  panting fit to burst, and then (only then) will Rey gain on him. An old man, walking in the tide, staring out to the edge of the sea.

He turns to stare at her, draggled and soaked as she is, like some sea creature washed ashore. Rey stares back.

“I’m back.” Her voice is no child’s voice. “Master, I’ve come home.” Water drips down her nose.

Luke smiles. “So I see.” His eyes spark with all their old sharpness, and all their old warmth. His voice is the voice of the sea, only it doesn’t shake Rey; not so much as it used to. “Well done,” he says, “my most faithful apprentice,” and stretches out his hand.

Rey reaches across time, across the sand and water swirling beneath them. She can’t help but laugh, at the pure wonder of it, when Luke Skywalker’s fingers lace through hers.  


End file.
